Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Dates not allowed on Google (.cn)'s Calendar

As you may know, Google's Chinese localised version is heavily censored.  When the search results contain pages you are not allowed to see, Google.cn usually returns a notice on the result page : "据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示" (Some results are omitted as restrited by local laws and policies).

One curious Chinese bloger wondered, how many days in a year are outlawed by "local laws"? He worte a script and found out that, out of 366 days, 11 of them will result the censorship notice on the search result page, these are:

* 13 January
* 31 May
* 4 June
* 13 June
* 20 June
* 25 June
* 30 June
* 5 July
* 19 September
* 13 Octorber
* 18 December

The rationale behind some of these censored dates are quite obvious, like 4 June is the date symbolises Tiananmen Square Massacre and the recent riots in China's Uyghur dominated Xinjiang Region started on 5 July.

However, even as a politically minded Chinese, I don't quite get why the rest of dates are considered "sensitive". I checked Wikipedia, there are some past events related to China, however, most of them are quite normal and can be hardly considered as sensitive events.

Google: It's a dangerous world out there

I was searching stuffs for my essay this morning, and suddenly this happened. In fact, every single result was flagged by Google as a site with "malwares". The glitches lasted for about half an hour.

Google fixed and explained what was hapened quite fast. According their blog, when they were updating the blacklist, the value " / " was accidentally checked as an identifier for sites with malwares, and of course, every URL got that slash.

Googling Google

Google today released the fastest rising and highest volume search terms recorded in New Zealand in 2008. I don't want to repeat the whole list, you can see it here.

However, I have found the list somewhat strange, first it's in the news, but you cannot find anything in Google Zeitgeist, where Google usually publish these stuffs.

The other one is, Google itself is placed sixth of the list. after "Trademe", but before "TV".

Here's my interpretation. There's a trend that, especially among the young people, when you want to visit facebook, very few people actually type facebook.com: what they do is type google.com, then search  facebook. They also tend to ignore the "I'm feeling lucky" button, which may save them 5 seconds.

I also understand some people don't even bother to type google.com, instead, they just ask "google" in the address bar. Most of modern browser will take all apparently non-URL form queries to a designated search engine.

Well, it just shows that search engines are becoming more like a doorway to the Internet, a kind of replacement of your browser's address bar.

Google Street View for New Zealand

Finally, it's New Zealand's turn. I don't know whether Google didn't say they'll do New Zealand soon or I didn't notice the news, but if I knew Google was coming, I would definitely erect a huge board, asking Google to do "no index, no follow, no cache" for my property.

Well, I checked my home, not bad, you cannot see anything apart from my fence.

If you live in centres like Auckland or Wellington, I urge you to check your home here to see whether your privacy is at any kind of risk, like this one ... you can make a complaint to google.

Actually the coverage is quite good, except some west coast roads down south and Stewart Island, rest of the New Zealand is pretty much covered.

back in time

As part of Google’s celebration of its 10^th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.

Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.

This enables you  to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.

Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.

Auckland University switching to Google Apps

Auckland University's email services will be switching to Google Apps next month.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?